Within the next 2 years millennials (ages 18-35) will make up the majority of the workforce. As I mentioned on Facebook page, these (myself included) are people who don’t know what it’s like to not have social and collaborative tools to get work done. We search on Google, share comments on Twitter, post pictures on Instagram, connect with friends on Facebook, share our location on Foursquare, write our ideas in blogs, post reviews on Yelp, and build our resumes on Linkedin. We don’t know what it’s like to use a legacy intranet, to get 150 emails a day, work in a cubicle, and to not be able to easily connect with and engage with people and information. Yet for some reason this is exactly how organizations are set up today.

Most organizations are “pointing” 180 degrees away from the future workforce, and it’s a scary thing. In other words it’s as if someone is telling all these companies what they need to do to prepare for the future and they are literally saying, “nah we’ll do the exact opposite and see what happens.”

Some companies have already been working on adapting their organizations for the past few years, but many have not. Those companies should really be feeling a sense of urgency right about now.

If your organization is still stuck using legacy technologies and approaches to getting work done what do you think will happen when millennials join your organization? In fact, why would they want to join your organization at all? They wouldn’t. This means that as the baby boomers retire and as knowledge and experience literally walks out your front that you don’t have an attractive enough proposition to replace those employees with new top talent.

Most organizations today are still working the same way they did 20, 30, and 50 years ago. It’s time to adapt quickly, or you can leave things the way they are and see what happens…

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Principal of Chess Media Group, a social business consultancy. Jacob works with mid and enterprise organizations on developing customer and employee engagement strategies. He is also the co-author of Twittfaced, a social media 101 book for business. Jacob authors a Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 blog.